House of Eratosthenes

Via Boortz: For the good of the GOP, the White House and the treacherous traitors in the Senate have kissed and made-up. Perhaps the last shot has been fired in this little fracas. In the article that describes the compromise, one statement jumps out and makes me want to vomit one more time.

The agreement contains concessions by both sides, though the White House yielded ground on two of the most contentious issues: It agreed to drop a provision that would have narrowly interpreted international standards of prisoner treatment and another allowing defendants to be convicted on evidence they never see.

The accord, however, explicitly states that the president has the authority to enforce Geneva Convention standards and enumerates acts that constitute a war crime, including torture, rape, biological experiments, and cruel and inhuman treatment.

The agreement would grant Congress’ permission for Bush to convene military tribunals to prosecute terrorism suspects, a process the Supreme Court had blocked in June because it had not been authorized by lawmakers.

During those trials, coerced testimony would be admissible if a judge allows and if it was obtained before cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment was forbidden by a 2005 law. Bush wanted to allow all such testimony, while three maverick Republican senators John McCain of Arizona, John Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had wanted to exclude it. [emphasis mine]

Maybe not in my lifetime, but perhaps in the lifetime of my son and my grandchildren: Historians will look over the rusty wreck of what once was America, and wonder when the whole thing jumped the shark. They’ll decide the turning point was the Chief Justiceship of Earl Warren, 1954-1969. The decade-and-a-half in which the law stopped thinking about what happened, and began to worry excessively about what could be proven to have happened, according to…rules? They started out that way. Rules. Nowadays, there isn’t much logic involved in them. The important thing doesn’t seem to be what the rules actually are, but that they’re simply there. That there’s resistance, as much as possible. They’re more like obstacles on a miniature golf course. Barricades. Resistance for resistance’s sake.

Up until then, justice had something to do with truth. Chief Justice Warren unmoored the boat of justice from the dock of truth. Since then, year by year, traitors to truth like McCain Warner and Graham, push the boat farther away as the “Fuck The Establishment” crowd cheers them on; whoever tries to bring the boat in, and put Truth and Justice in the same sentence, is pilloried and excoriated. We’ve seen that. And now, after generations of politicians re-defining justice to bolster their approval ratings, between truth and justice, there’s no overlap; none at all. There is the question of the defendant’s guilt or lack thereof, and there is the question of what will happen to him. Nobody even expects one to have an affect on the other anymore. Guilty guys in jail? Innocent men being set free? Maybe it’ll happen, maybe not. Why would you expect it. This isn’t Dodge City, and Marshall Matt Dillon is dead as dead can be.

If a bad guy is a bad guy and we know he’s a bad guy, the paramount question is no longer whether he’s a bad guy or not, but whether his badness was established according to vague, ethereal rules. Sensible rules, or not…who knows…but unwritten, and predictable as a bouncing football. McCain/Warner/Graham and their sympathizers, instruct me to believe that the rules define “what America is all about.” But nobody really knows what they are, and nobody’s really supposed to. They define what the country is all about, the way the tax code defines what the country is all about. A hundred accountants will give you a hundred answers, and nobody thinks otherwise.

It’s supposed to be about upholding rights. But you can tell that isn’t it. Such an exercise would be a balancing act. But the black-hearted, cockfaced RINO triumvirate of McCain/Warner/Graham don’t behave as people do when they’re engaged in a balancing act. They don’t walk the way a man does when he’s on a tightrope; the knee-wobbling, the hip-jiggling, the surgical precision, these things are absent just as they were in Earl Warren’s time. Their struggle is unidirectional.

Because of course, those rules are never more glorious than when they are interpreted broadly. This kind of brain surgery isn’t done with a scalpel, instead the instrument at hand is an exploding grenade.

It’s all about making a legacy. I say to myself, if an exclusionary rule didn’t apply when I got this cool job, and now it does, gee whiz I just accomplished something. And if there was such an exclusionary rule, and under my watch it has been expanded, gee whiz then I, too, accomplished something. These legislative and judicial officers are supposed to be advancing both interests — bringing bad guys to justice and ensuring our civil liberties stay intact. But nobody ever achieves “hero” status through this balancing act in which they’re supposed to be engaged. No, the guy who expands the exclusionary rule is cheered with a virtual ticker-tape parade — inevitably, unwaveringly, assuredly — even as the bad guys are let out into the street for lack of evidence to hold them under the new rules. And his counterpart, who swings the pendulum the other direction by narrowing the exclusionary rules…he is booed and hissed. Again, without exception. He “curtailed our civil liberties,” after all.

So, balancing act my ass. That’s what these politicians are supposed to be doing, but they’re not balancing a damn thing. They’re whittling something away, generation after generation like water on a rock, until there won’t be any more of it.

And so, we have to release more and more bad guys, and find new, creative, innovative ways to release bad guys, to thunderous applause. Keep in mind, it only counts if logic is molested. To release a good guy who was really falsely accused, wouldn’t count, because America has always been a place where the accused enjoy the benefit of the doubt. There’s no novelty in saying “Here’s your exculpatory evidence, now you must release him” — rather a cliched, Hollywood fairy-tale by now. No, to get the adoration of the cheering masses, you have to release scum. You have to flood the streets with people that common sense says, really committed the crimes of which they are accused. Because a “new” law that fails to buck common sense, wouldn’t pack the punch. It wouldn’t have that special zing. It wouldn’t stick it to Da Man.

Go back and read that bolded fragment one more time. McCain/Warner/Graham wanted to exclude evidence…so you have evidence that says Ahmed wanted to blow something up, the RINOs say you can’t present it, and if that means Ahmed walks then he walks.

Because, I guess, that’s the “American” way of doing things.

For how long, I wonder?

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Well, That Was Lame IIIFriday, September 22nd, 2006

Well, That Was Lame III
Friday, September 22nd, 2006